Procreation of the Wicked
by The Voice in the Wilderness
Summary: An afterward to "I'm Not Well, But I'm Better" - Naraku is a physician with a dark secret and Rin, a nurse with a complex soul. This will be a collection of dark erotic chapters whose subject will be the wicked play of power and pleasure. Very adult; AU
1. Chapter 1

_All copywritten characters are the sole properties of their owners; no money is being made and no infringement is intended. "3 Libras" by A Perfect Circle is the song on the stereo - I make no claims to it, other than it is fun to play - once you down-tune far enough, that is. A small but significant note - someone once asked me to write a piece of dark erotica featuring Naraku and (adult, for chrissake!) Rin. That request turned itself into the story, "I'm Not Well, But I'm Better". I've always thought the key to real S&M is the control of another formidable will - by the most devastating means necessary, drowning in the play of power and pleasure. That is what these two are all about; power and pleasure. If you wonder at my thoughts about little Rin's powerful nature - even as a child - well, Sesshoumaru went to hell and back for her, neh? She must being doing something right._

_Naraku is a physician with a dark secret and Rin, a nurse with a rather complex soul - please be warned for lightly mentioned drug use and violent sex. This plays itself off as a sort of afterward to "I'm Not Well..." but you don't need to know or care about that to enjoy this, I think. Just thought I'd do you the courtesy of mentioning it should I be wrong :) Enjoy._

Normally Rin hated to float to other units when the ICU was slow... especially during the midnight shift... but...

Tweaking the rate of the nitroglycerin drip before her smoky eyes, Rin couldn't keep the tiny grin from tickling the corner of her lips. The cardiac floor was like a mini-vacation. Integrillin, heparin... hell, even Doribax and vancomycin for the occasional infection – piece of cake. She could deal with the increase in patient load as long as... never mind.

"Nurse, can I have a drink of water?", the small woman in the bed asked her in a tiny voice, drawing her nurse back to reality.

"Just a tiny sip, Mrs. Qin – you're going for a heart cath in the morning and that means nothing by mouth after this, OK?", Rin smiled back, handing her bird-like patient a cup of cool water.

"Thank you; you're such a nice girl.", the patient tittered and settled back into her white puff of bedding, looking even more like a little silver-haired bird.

"Indeed – our hospital's nurses are very nice girls." drawled a familiar rasping voice too close to Rin's back for any sort of comfort.

What the_ fuck _was he doing here at this hour?

"If you need anything or have any concerns, Mrs. Qin, please call me on your nurse call-light...", Rin smiled at her patient, ignoring the tall doctor standing in the doorway completely, attempting to get the hell out that room and out of reach before she could say something incredibly unprofessional in front of a patient.

Naraku Onigumo, MD strode into the room and putting a long pale hand across the back of her neck cut off all hope of escape completely. Drawing her back to the foot of the bed, he made Rin stand next to him as he did a leisurely consult visit for the sweet, smiling little bird-woman with a piss-poor heart.

Shifting her weight from foot to foot, Rin Taisho, RN ground her teeth at the tall physician taking his sweet time, discussing past history and current symptoms. She hated Onigumo so much – he was never nice to a patient... unless it suited his purpose, which tonight apparently was to make her wait at the foot of the bed, doing nothing – getting further and further behind in her own work, damn it! After reassuring the elderly woman laying before him, that her "lovely nurse" would be on hand for any further assistance, Dr. Onigumo too-politely dismissed himself from the room, without so much as a glance at the annoyed nurse at the foot of the bed.

"What a nice man! You should see if he's not married, dear...", Mrs. Qin tittered up at her through crinkled eyes, clearly enamored of her new Pulmonologist.

Rin Taisho just wanted to fucking _scream._

Sanitizing her hands as she walked out of the room, Rin wondered how many of her patients now wanted her undivided attention and how many of those IV pumps going off were hers. The hand twisting her hair into a painful knot at the back of her head was the straw the broke the camel's back.

"Get your fucking sick hands off me!", Rin snarled at the mobile cardiac monitor that currently had her hair in a tangled death-grip. Rin cursed her luck, the idiot kami and last but certainly not least, she cursed Naraku Onigumo, whose fault every vile thing in her life owed itself. Father told her not to get involved with demons; too late to listen to him now...

The charge nurse and a few other staff members gaped at her like beached goldfish. Doctor Onigumo was immersed in his dictation behind a rack of charts, but Rin didn't miss his broad back shaking in devious glee at her embarrassment. Demons indeed.

"Do you need a hand?", a friendly nurse's aid asked her, trying not to laugh.

"Yeah – you can just shoot me now.", Rin dead-panned back with a heavy sigh, fiddling with the tele-mon tangled in her hair.

He was still there – and worse, he was busy. A stack of charts found their way into the discharge rack.

The charge nurse got off the phone as Rin was passing the desk with a cup of pills and an IV bag. Her smiling face is a bad sign, Rin thought to herself and tried to walk just a little faster.

"Rin, it looks like Dr. Onigumo is discharging most of his patients tonight and the super says the ER is dead, so we're going to cancel you for the rest of the night. It looks like you're going home, you lucky dog!", the charge nurse lobbed after Rin's scurrying form. "Hang those up and give report to Asa and Motoko, please."

"Damn it...", Rin ground out as she ducked into the next patient's room.

She saw him check his watch and had a flashback of checking that same mechanism for the time as a grey, gritty dawn came upon her, nervous and hungover in a stranger's bathroom. Giving report on her final patient to the blonde nurse before her, Rin nearly threw her hands up in victory when the tall, violet-clad figure of her worst enemy unfolded himself casually from the desk and stalked off to she didn't care where! Tossing his elaborately braided hair across his back, Rin remembered the gruesome sight that queered the otherwise gorgeous sight of Naraku's naked form... his back, a monstrous scar...

"Rin, you stopped talking – are you ok?", the nurse before her asked, concerned.

"Uh – yes, I'm fine. Sorry. Where was I?", she smiled nervously.

"Integrillin drip. You know something? They say he's dating some nurse up on SICU.", the younger woman replied with a conspiratorial smirk.

"Oh my god – are you fucking serious?", Rin groaned out, forgetting herself. _Kagome..._

"I know! Lucky bitch, right?", the other girl completely missed her meaning with a hungry smile.

She knew he'd be waiting for her. Rin walked out the ER doors after waving to the security guard, trying to give the big off-duty cop a genuine smile. Maybe he'd do something to save her from what she knew was waiting for her outside those glass doors. It was threatening sleet tonight and Naraku's black, wool-clad form seemed to suck her out into the cold, wet darkness from where he stood, half in and out of his professional form, dark cobalt lenses hiding his monstrous red eyes, his morbid purple lab coat peeking in the wind from under the dread black wings of his ubiquitous overcoat. The thin wisps of shining black hair escaping enforced captivity in his long serpentine braid caught her eyes as they strained in the swirling eddies of the cold late Autumn wind.

Beautiful and dangerous and all hers – whether Rin liked it or not.

The low growl of the large black car behind her lover's leaning form made her think of Charon and just to be a wise-ass, she fished into her pockets, pulled out a quarter and threw it at Naraku as she reached for the door.

"Let's go, Ferryman – take me to hell already." she muttered, unimpressed that he ignored the coin utterly, letting it bounce off his shoulder with a dull thud.

"You can't always get what you want, my girl.", Naraku whispered down into her ear, helping Rin into his car, helping himself to a handful of her ass in the process. A wicked smile missed his mad eyes utterly.

"Dr. Mengele!", Rin hissed back at her escort, who leaned over her with smoldering malevolence.

"Watch your tongue or I'll gag you right here, little bitch.", Naraku hissed back, his wicked voice a bass snarl, gripping his cock through his elegant doctor's garb. "Or don't you like the idea of showing off your great catch to the rest of the hospital?" He asked Rin quietly, stroking the side of her clenched jaw with his cold fingertips of devastating gentleness, making nerves sing fire in her ticklish cheek.

"Don't you dare!

"Oh yes, my girl, I believe I fucking _love_ the idea, the feel of your beautiful pouting lips swallowing my cock inch by hard inch right here, right now. Come on, suck me.", Naraku whispered down to her, slowly massaging his groin, his broad, tall frame cutting off any escape back to the ER, trapping the suddenly dry-throated Rin in a very... compromising position.

"Naraku, get in the fucking car!" Rin hissed, her cheeks flamed in the flux of twin embarrassment and sudden desire.

Her tormentor laughed wickedly, shock himself off within his voluminous black coat and calmly helped himself to the driver's side of the idling car.

Sleet turned to thick wet snow as they drove in heavy silence. Every time Naraku shifted his marred back against the seat in unconscious discomfort, Rin was reminded of the taste of his skin, the feel of his captive body in her slick hand. The longer he said nothing to her, concentrating on the treacherous roads, the more she became aware of the man next to her.

After an eternity remembering the feel of Naraku's fist in her hair and hating herself for the fine tremor of desire now coursing under her skin, Rin tried to talk her way out her ball of confusion; it was her nature to talk when the going got weird.

"Where are we going?", she spoke up loudly, her voice echoing off the massive dash.

"Why do you suddenly care?", Naraku shot back without looking at her, neutering any further attempt at a civil discussion.

"Why do I suddenly _care_? Because I should be at work, dumb shit! Because I'm suddenly hurtling down some lost highway with my insane junkie _boyfriend_ going god-knows-where! Fuck – I don't even like you, Naraku! Why me?", Rin blurted out, throwing her hands up and vented her grievances to the oncoming night.

She had time to see Naraku narrow his maroon eyes down at her and then she was holding on for dear life as he hit the brakes too hard, sending the car into a sickening fishtail on the slushy road. Rin found all the air had suddenly left her lungs in a shocked instant and all she could do was open her mouth on dead air where a scream was just dying to manifest – if it could have. The world before her eyes was a sick tilt-a-whorl for about 30 seconds until Naraku steered into the skid and the big black machine threw them back on the straight and narrow, happily eating down the miles towards their final destination.

"How sweet, Taisho – you called me your 'boyfriend'.", Naraku smiled down at her with infinite malice.

"Yeah, well – the truth hurts. Naraku, why the hell do you have to keep ruining my life?", Rin ground out with bitter humor, hiding her red face against the passenger seat.

"Don't blame yourself on me, bitch.", Naraku snarled suddenly and they continued their journey in pressured silence. Hate and desire twined visibly within the dark physician's hard eyes and each time Rin allowed herself the sin of looking up at him, she found he was looking askance at her...

She had been here before, damn it. Left to fend for herself in the den of her twin-manifest enemy with nothing but her purse, her well-worn kit of female resourcefulness. At least she had underwear this time... Rin mused bitterly as she bathed the scent of sickness and disinfectant off of her small body. Steam rose in waves around her and though the bathroom she found herself occupying was both bright and spacious, she kept seeing dark waves of amorphous monsters in the crack of the door. Rin wondered if Naraku was watching her with his mad red eyes, livid with weird fire in his beautifully cold white face. She wondered if the escaping humidity was making his hair writhe in frizzy waves about his taunt body – covered in wounds, both healed and unhealed. She wondered in a sick flash if the sight of her wet and naked made his cock hard.

"Ugh... I'm fucking sick in the head.", Rin mumbled to herself and scrubbed harder at her soap-slimy hair.

But still, she found her eyes wondering back to the crack of the bathroom door and its sliver of waiting darkness. Each time she caught herself looking for her dark lover's hungry gaze, she berated herself. Fingers sliding with soap along her hips, her thighs, Rin wondered what was really behind her blushing anger. Self-reflection with subsequent honesty was not her strong suit; that was what he gave her, what he dragged kicking and screaming from her, Rin frowned at her hands as they drew soapy trails down the glass encasing her in heat and denial.

_Caring is what I do... !, _her own shrill frustration rang in her too-sharp memory and Naraku's hard voice whipped back at her instantly:

_But it does not have to be all you are...!_

"You don't see me...", she whispered to herself and laying her suddenly still mind with its pretty dark head against the watery glass, just let the shower beat her into tiny wet submission.

She was surprised he didn't come to somehow torment her during her shower absolutions. There was no sign of her tormentor, except for a razor which she gleefully left full of stubble on purpose. He might not have ever existed except for in her smoky memories. And the the fact that somewhere in the dark of their secluded snowy refuge there was an oddly winsome music coming from another part of the cabin.

… _I threw you the obvious and you flew with it on your back... a name in your recollection, down among a million same... difficult not to feel a little bit disappointed and passed over..._

Strange down-tuned notes slid in rueful reflection and a sonorous voice wailed out the tragedy of knowing too much in her ears. Something threw itself across her own back, like a premonition of doom. Rin didn't like it – she suddenly had doubts about everything. Looking for something to cover her nakedness, she grabbed the nearest non-towel object and went out to face the music.

Naraku was lying on his belly upon the floor in front of a raging fire, his normal pallor a hellish cast of oranges and pinks upon a large white flokati rug. His long, tall form stretched out lazily, his hair still bound in its braid. His dark head lay upon his crossed arms, a thin dark shirt riding high across his ribs on one side in uncaring abandon, covering his horrific scar from her casual eyes. Somehow his long, bare feet made him look even more disarmed, Rin thought to herself for a second as she tried to move silently and enjoy the still moment of her lover at rest.

Moving with uncommon grace, Rin held the long indigo yukata closed when the arm of a couch pulled softly at her as she moved slowly closer to the fire's warmth.

The song continued to sway and slide against her ears, the voice pleading with her to not disappoint any more than she already had.

… _I see you naked but oblivious and you don't see me..._

A familiar longish, smallish black leather box taunted her from its place on the coffee table. A used insulin syringe sat quietly beside the box and screamed silent obscenities in her ears. Sublimaze, most likely... perhaps only morphine this time, Rin thought bitterly and ground her teeth together in dull red anger. Damn him!

… _Here I am expecting just a little bet too much from the wounded... see through, see you..._

She watched the rise and fall of his back and counted...

"I am still breathing, Taisho. You may quit looking around for the Narcan now." Naraku Onigumo's muffled voice drawled up to her through the baffle of his crossed arms. She could hear the dark smile on his lips from where she stood, one side of her on fire with blazing heat, the other dark and damp, chilled to the bone.

Silk rushed like solid water over his body as the large man before her pushed himself onto his back. Rin noted he did so with not even a stifled hiss of pain... and though she knew the reason for Naraku's madness, his addiction, still she hated him utterly for such weakness... pitied him, needed him, wanted to heal him... wanted to devour him...

_...You don't see me... You don't see me... You don't see me at all..._

"You look beautiful in my clothes – now take them off.", Naraku growled up at her and beckoned his tumultuous mistress to him on the floor.

Rin could see the fire-light jumping in Naraku's pin-point eyes, she saw desire and conquest and above all, she saw _need_. Even with the narcotics slurring through his veins, Naraku was hard as a stone for her. Power between them shifted and writhed and Rin felt a jolt of black frenzy to be the one looming over the supine form of her demon lover, descending at her whim for whatever her pleasure required. She stepped closer and let the deep blue robe slip down, once shoulder at a time. Her hand still clutched the mass of scattering silk to her solar plexus and as she knelt down slowly, her breasts were next to be exposed to the searing heat radiating from the fireplace before her. Naraku pushed himself up on one arm to join her in battle but before his dread voice could say anything to her, Rin issued her own command. Her voice was as hard as his body and just as hungry.

"You will turn around."

His eyes narrowed a fraction in irritation but Naraku did as he was told without a single word, facing the raging inferno and denying her his doomed beauty utterly.

Letting the robe fall open completely, Rin shook the sleeves down to her elbows and set to work unbinding her lover's waist-length captive hair. She could see the outline of his whip-hard body through the black silk of his own clothing. Resting one long arm on a bent leg, he bore her occasional pulling of his waving hair with stony silence. As her fingers made slow progress against the Gordian complexity of Dr. Onigumo's hair, Rin felt strange planes and valleys against the heels of her twisting hands as she traveled down his back; reminders of the seared wasteland of the man's flesh just under the thin covering of silk.

When she was untangling the ends of his full black hair, Rin remembered that the man before her was a tragedy, a fallen angel. Having stripped the malicious butcher Onigumo from her damned lover Naraku, Rin Taisho began to strip Naraku from his clothes. Her hands traveled around his ribs to the buttons of his shirt and began blindly to undo each one. When she undid the second one, she felt Naraku's hot hands on her bent legs, caressing what he could reach hungrily. Rin smiled to herself and slowed down. She scooted against Naraku's back, molding herself against his dark side and perching her chin upon his hard shoulder, concentrating on the feeling of trying to blindly pull him from his shirt. Fine downy hairs met her fingertips as she worked down the slow bellows of his fire-baked stomach. Concentrating on her work, Rin blew her small breaths against her lover's dark mantle of wild hair, tormenting him in his enforced stillness with the pressure of her own, cupping his marred body in her own with unconscious possession.

Grabbing her hands suddenly in his own, Naraku simply ripped the remaining buttons open and ran her hands up his fire-hot chest with a rumbling growl. He split her intentions, guiding one of her captive hands to his throat and the other into his lap, teasing her fingers with both life and death. Naraku thrust himself into her hand and closed her small hand around his throat. Rin could feel his heart hammering just under the thin skin and for a moment thought of trying to still it – that thought flew across her mind as Naraku once again pumped himself in her tight grip and the heavy breath that vibrated across her fingers decided her utterly; he wanted her to simply do whatever she had a mind to do to him, be it pain, sex or death.

Naraku's brutal honesty had always been his most disarming weapon against her. It was their eternal battle that set them both aflame. Rin allowed herself to run her nails against his carotid pulse, remembering the taste of metal in her mouth, remembering his own hungry words in the face of her self-righteous compassion. Leaning up and nosing her way through his hair to one ear, she whispered another throaty command.

"Give me what is mine.", Rin smiled into Naraku's captive ear, punctuating her will with a ironic laugh.

Quick as a serpent, Naraku had twisted her hand out of his silk-covered lap and pulling her by the hand around his throat, stretched himself out on the thick white flokati. Rin found herself suddenly exposed to the full heat of the roaring fireplace for a split second then found herself astride her dark lover, her hand still held captive at his throat. Naraku arched his back quickly, grinding her against him, tearing out a moan she never knew she was holding from him, causing her to momentarily tighten her grip on his throat. The unbidden gurgle of asphyxia lept from Naraku's open mouth and he curled up instinctively towards her, digging his own blunt nails into her arms in supplication.

"Take what is yours if you can, bitch.", he smiled up at her, grinding himself into her spread core once again, reflected fire taunting her in his crazy red eyes, panting against her steely grip.

Rin leaned down into Naraku's leering face, nose to nose. He let go of her hand around his throat to grip her hips. Rin thought of what she might do if he let her...

Instead she kissed him and though Naraku open his mouth to her advances, she did not take him.

She felt him twitch against her again and knew dominion.

Rin kissed him again, slower this time and delved into his open mouth with her own but stopped suddenly when Naraku engaged her tongue with his own, pulling herself to once again hover over his fire-lit face.

She saw frustration begin to surface in the taunt lines of his narrowing eyes, along his aquiline nose and Rin let herself admit that her lover was beautiful. So dangerously beautiful! Like Narcissus she'd fallen into his reflecting pool and knew she'd never emerge intact. He didn't want her to.

Again, after her momentary reflection, Rin once again kissed the man in her tightening grasp, slowly, licking at his lips, his tongue, the inside of his cheek, enjoying herself completely. When Naraku tried to join her with his own limber tongue, she tightened her grip upon his throat, which stilled him a handful of times...

Until he could no longer stand her teasing and simply gripped her head tightly to his face and let her choke him for his trespass. Nerves sang in her mouth at his invasion and angered at the loss of power, Rin dug her nails into his throat, earning her a gurgling groan of absolute yet somehow sickening pleasure from the man beneath her.

Pulling hard out of his iron grip, Rin's heaving breaths cleared the fog of dark desire from her mind enough for her to realize what she was doing.

"This is madness, Naraku...! What is it that you want – do you want me to kill you?", Rin heaved out between shaking breaths, holding herself up with moderate difficulty as Naraku again pumped himself against her soaked core. Crescent-shaped indents on his white throat accused her of depravities, and made Rin wonder just what she really was capable of. But something clenched hard within her at the thought of Naraku at her mercy – god, but that was so fucking hot... _it is does not have to be all you are...!_

"My beautiful liar, girl – what more do I have to do to make you real? You want what is yours?", Naraku smiled a filthy grin up at her and cleared his hoarse throat once more.

Grabbing her bodily, he shoved her back down his legs enough to free himself from the captivity of his remaining clothing, only to bring her back down to grind hard against him, flesh to wet flesh.

"This is yours, so take it.", he smiled and then moaned when she herself slipped hard against him.

He once again pulled one of her stiff arms forward and drug her nails across his heart, laughing once more at her shocked and needy face.

'This is yours, so take it, my girl.", Naraku growled up at her, the smile evaporating from his snarling lips.

Her other hand he once more placed at his throat.

"This is yours, so take it, my little lying bitch. You don't like me, you love me – you want me. You need me. So take me. Tell the truth for once in your life and shame the Devil." he cursed her with sudden throaty vehemence.

"I hate you, Naraku.", Rin whispered meaning it and so much more, thrusting herself hard down upon his offered cock with a growl all her own.

Rin rode Naraku, snarling back when his face drew up in a rictus of wicked pleasure. She poured her desire, her frustrations, her insecurities, her entire soul's twisted permutations into Naraku's brutal pitiless love and matched him thrust for thrust, pain for pain. Moments stretched into sweating eons of flesh slapping against flesh – fire-bright and midnite cold. Naraku flipped her onto her back and Rin gripped his throat with both hands of her own black desire to hurt, to force her mastery over the wicked owner of her now-tainted heart – anything just to hang on for dear life.

Sweating hands struggling for grip on her snapping hips as he fucked her senseless, Naraku snarled obscenities into her own shadowed face. Rin could only tighten her hands around his throat as she was held, stabbed and remade. When the tightening coil of insanity burst within her like an exploding star, Naraku, gurgling – choking in her death-grip, slammed himself within her yowling body, and clawed at her hands – coming in convulsions of blue-black strangulation and glory.

Days passed in delirium and once again Rin found herself at home in the ICU where she belonged. She could hear Kagome talking to someone, over the incessant beeps and wails of machinery life and death. Titrating a propofol drip, Rin didn't realize how loud everything around her had been until no one was talking suddenly. What the hell was everyone so quiet about suddenly out there?

She walked out to the main desk and her stomach hit the tile at her feet in what Rin was sure was an audible splat. The black braid hung down the familiar violet-coated back before her. But it was Kagome's voice that chilled her heart and flamed her cheeks.

"Doctor Onigumo, what happened to you?", Kagome actually managed to sound like she really cared, which was a really, REALLY bad sign.

He must have sensed her behind him, because the dark physician turned suddenly, giving Rin his profile and the best possible view of the blue-black bruises of her finger prints around his throat. His dried-blood eyes narrowed a fraction at her suddenly wan face and turned quickly back to the pile of charts before him, dismissing Rin utterly. Hate welled up hard in her gut for the prick Dr. Onigumo and Rin stalked back stiffly to her patient – cursing his name to any god who would listen. _Fucking crazy junkie masochist mutherfucker... gorgeous... hot... insatiable...!_ The gods just smiled at her and continued to drool idiot light down on her embarrassed little head.

"The truth hurts, Ms. Higurashi – and you'll tell Nurse Taisho to come out here at once; I shouldn't have to wait on you nurses to complete my rounds.", Naraku's deep voice rasped out – then cracked into a hoarse croak.

Kagome blinked once, twice and then lowered her own voice. "What did she do to you?", the nervous charge nurse quietly asked the papers before her wide eyes.

Naraku idly scratched the deep purples and greens blooming on the side of his throat and smiled.

"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about...", Naraku snorted derisively.


	2. Chapter 2

_Again, all copy-written work is the sole properties of their respective owners. No infringement is intended; no money is being made. I make no claims to the lyrics of "Murder" and "There's No Way Out Of Here" by David Gilmour - I just like his point of view and his liquid voice. Talented fucker..._

The woman before her was dying and Rin could do so very little about it, god dammit!

"Crank the oxygen wide-open, and throw the bed all the way up, she's barely moving any air – call Respiratory now! Where are we – stepdown? Call the medical emergency team now before we have to code this lady!", Rin called out over the labored wheezing of the woman before her, grey and sweating... dying...

"I'll get the crash cart, and the chart! Does she have Pulmonary on the case?", the small blonde nurse before her called back as she hurried out of the room for the code cart.

"Dr. Sumire's group... oh my god, let anyone but him be on call!", Rin prayed and started dialing her cellphone.

_Rinnnnng... Riiiiiiinnnng..._

"Keep breathing Mrs. Asoka, in and out – you're doing fine, keep going...", Rin begged the woman failing before her in her neediest, calmest voice...

"This is Onigumo and it had better be good."

"Son of a fucking bitch!", Rin swore over her fate, moving to allow the respiratory therapist through.

"Dr. Onigumo, this is Taisho from Stepdown, 3 north and we have a patient in respiratory distress...", Rin let her training hit the gas, hard. Orders received to intubate, transfer to ICU, and so on and so forth... it was another day at the office.

"Any other orders, Doctor?", Rin heaved a sigh of mental relief, so glad Naraku decided to be a damn professional – for once.

"No.", Naraku's dead snarl wilted her ear as he hung up on her. Click.

The emergency team was quickly getting the poor failing woman ready for transport behind her as Rin received the ICU bed assignment. She called report as four people flew the large bed and it's unstable cargo down the hall.

Breathing a sign of relief through her mussed hair, Rin fingered a discarded electrode wrapper and tried to look at it as another one saved... at least for the time being; at least for now. Somehow, it just wasn't enough.

_On your own admission, you raised up the knife and brought it down, ending another man's life..._

She needed another damn job, Rin thought for the umpteenth time; saving the world one person at a time was getting damn old. Just as she was walking out on the scene of her latest tragedy – thinking to herself, time to go back out, save more lives and make a fucking difference, Rin Taisho's phone rang.

"Taisho here."

"You are going to beg me to forgive you, my girl. I am many things, but I'm not your bitch, woman."

"Naraku... how the fuck-"

"Caller id, half-wit. Meet me upstairs. Be there before me, or I am coming down there to get you. _Verstaendlich_?"

"But the intubation-", Rin tried to stammer through the haze of her shock.

"Even I can here them calling the code over the over-head pager, Taisho...looks like I can drive the speed limit now; the hard part will be done."

The operator was calling the code team to the room she'd just sent Mrs. Asoka to; Rin winced at Naraku's ever-frustrating penchant for being right.

_What was it that brought you out here in the dark? Was it your only way of making your mark?_

"I hate you so much sometimes, Naraku.", Rin growled into the phone and hung up on him.

She loved lying in the sun. Rin had moved around so much as a child, her father moving them constantly from place to place, never truly settling down for more than a few months, so she'd never decided where home was before – until she meet the beach.

Never mind that she hated swimsuits and tourists. Or the briny smell of low tide. Or the creepy feel of seaweed against her legs in the water. The ocean was home; it had no memory and made no demands.

She rolled over in the sun's hot embrace and basked like a lotion-slicked lizard on a rock.

Something kept waving across her closed eyes, dark filaments infiltrating the red heat behind her closed eyes in a most annoying way. 'What the hell, man?', she mental swore and finally swatted at the black interlopers.

They flitted away when she swatted lazily, only to return momentarily, hovering about her face, tickling her in the worst way!

"Goddammit, fucking bugs!", Rin swore and slapped in earnest, whacking the tall, languid physician looming over her sun-kissed body.

She'd knocked his blue lenses cockeyed across his patrician's face, one amused bloody-red eye swallowing her whole, his maleficent smile promising her delicious torment... later...

"Spiders, especially.", Rin huffed out and rolled over on her belly. Why the hell he'd insisted he'd come with her to lie in the sun was anyone's guess; Rin always figured Onigumo was a night-time sort of person. He looked down-right bizarre in the bright sunlight. His blue-black waist length mane of hair lay in state over his horrific scar, covering the blasted wasteland of pink and red scar tissue from the normal world around them – except whenever a sea breeze blew across them it would bell out around Naraku and once exposed, not a few beach-goers had stopped to stare. Rin wondered if he even noticed any longer. She would have.

"You're getting sun-burned, Taisho.", Naraku tossed down on her back – she could hear him grinning.

"No I'm not. I'm not the one who is fish-belly white.", Rin yawned back, not really listening.

"Oh yes you are – right here." Rin felt a finger-tip in the center of her back and then, her suit top was untied.

"Naraku! Stop it. What are you doing? This is a public place, you pervert!", she snapped back with a hiss of annoyance.

"I'm not doing anything, it's you who can't seem to tie a knot. Let me fix that for you.", the rasping voice above her smoothed out.

The tie at her neck was undone while she was expecting Naraku to fix the first one. Great... now, she was stuck!

"Naraku, dammit, stop it!"

"Oh you need more sun screen, let me get that for you." Suddenly warm liquid was hitting the dip of her back and before she could squirm away to replace her own bindings, Rin felt her demon lover's hot hand on her lower back.

"Hold still or my hand might slip."

"Oh - are you going to hurt someone with a palm full of sunscreen?"

"I don't know, Taisho – that depends. Does this hurt?"

She suddenly felt his hand on her ass, traveling in a slick hurry under the thin material and inside her wet depths before the shocked breath could leave her suddenly dry throat.

Naraku's devious chuckle against her sweating spine felt like sleet hitting her skin. She heard him reposition his large mass upon their shared blanket and felt his other, less occupied hand idly rub the lotion upon her shivering shoulders.

"Well? Am I hurting you?"

"No.", Rin managed to squeak out as he continued to finger her in broad, tropical daylight.

"No, _Doctor_, little nurse. Say it."

"Oh you can go FUCK yourself!", Rin lunged up and flashed a family of tourists more than just her bright red anger – dislodging her companion for his slick fun.

"_Jesus – look at that crazy woman... !" _

"_Nice tits – check it out, dude..."_

"_Oh my god, what's going on over there...?"_

"NARAKU, dammit!", Rin screeched and attempted to cover herself, squatting back quickly against her tormentor's grinning form, who'd thrown his hands up to cup both her bare breasts and her unbalanced weight, displaying them both in an awkward but smoldering tableau of embarrassing, wholly accidental and throughly exhibitionist sexual display. And in _public_ too...

"Smile for the camera, slut.", Naraku whispered in her ear as a couple of tourists captured her for posterity and future laughs on their phones.

Rin was so shocked, she did exactly as she was told. Teeth and cleavage... _click-click._

"_It' takes all kinds, doesn't it Kumiko...?"_

"_Christ – get a room..."_

"_Glad I'm not that woman..."_

"_What? Babe, I wish you were..."_

Rin was so ashamed, she turned around and stuck fast to Naraku, trying to throttle him and disappear from mostly-amused public view completely. The dregs of oily suntan lotion plastered them together with a gross squirt. Naraku began to laugh in earnest and gathering himself in seeming endless dignity, wrapped his embarrassed cargo's legs around his long waist and started the slow walk to his car through the hot, loose sand.

He'd come back for the their shit eventually; it was hers anyway. Maybe he'd make her throw on his white shirt and walk back to get it – she'd be nice and sweaty and _wet_... Naraku mused as he straighted his sore back against Rin's quivering, traumatized mass.

Naraku half-saw the gangly teenager with white blonde surfer hair jogging towards them out of the corner of his dried blood eye and had a wicked idea. He_ hated_ would-be heroes...

Rin's discarded bathing suit top whipped accusingly in the poor fool's nervous wake as he made a beeline for their slow progress through the dunes.

Naraku ignored his on-coming company and growled loudly enough for all three to hear him clearly:

"Just like you, my little hand-maiden – as at work, I must clean up all your little messes...", he trailed off with an evil giggle, nuzzling her ear just to egg the kid on some more.

"Hey, dude – this belongs to...", the nervous kid began, too loudly, panting and sand-spattered.

Naraku whipped his long face around and had just enough time mouth the joyous singular word:

"Watch."

… before Rin reared back, her oiled, gleaming skin alight with fury, screaming a shrill scream full of bloody murder for all of humanity, and slapped her dark lover hard enough to crack his neck.

Naraku caught their down-ward momentum against a convenient palm tree before they could hit the ground, obscenely delighted that the damage had been done.

The image of the tall dark man's hungry leer, red eyes gleaming over twin blue lenses in unabashed triumph and the sight of the woman, body arched in powerful fury, her face a rictus of vengeance - bare breasts swaying with the incredible elemental force of her anger, like some descending goddess of destruction, seduction... power, temptation, absolution...

Rin's top slithered out of the boy's numb fingers – and his world would never be the same.

"Behave woman, or I'll drop you right here. Someone else would be more than happy to help you home, I'm only too sure?" Naraku spoke with deceptive calm into Rin's hellish eyes, and so mortified she was operating on some motor-survival level that hearing the implied threat in his vicious voice, she squeaked back into her previous position, trying to hide as much naked self as she could against his upright body. Looking once over her dark shaking head at the stunned kid before them, Naraku smirked back a mouthful of fangs and left him adrift in the hot dunes.

"You did that on purpose, you evil prick. Didn't you?", Rin sniffed from where she'd been plopped down unceremoniously in the passenger seat, finally hidden from the sun and and the lies of men by the smoked-out windows of Naraku's beast of a car.

"I'm a giving sort of person, Taisho.", Naraku enthused dryly, cracking his neck and his sore jaw.

"I hate you, Naraku."

"Good. Now kiss me, bitch. I'm jealous of what you're going to be doing later in that kid's head. You will not raise that pretty hand to any master but me, girl. Come here." Naraku ground out in a deep purr, crawling into the suddenly small space with his gleaming, panting girl.

"Jealous of me?"

"I'm an addict, bitch. Give me my fix."

She couldn't talk back to that with a tongue in her mouth... but maybe... later...

_There's no way out of here, when you come in – you're in for good. There are no answers here, when you look out – you don't see in. There was no promise made, the part you played - the path you took..._

The man before her was dying – Rin was sure of it. Only she couldn't stop it – fuck, she couldn't even slow it down! Sweating, cold and gasping for air, the man before her would have been bone-white except that he was a horrid shade of icteric yellow. His liver was shot and quickly, the rest of him would follow...

Rin had the slight and uncomfortable luxury of a senior nursing student with her tonight and as the end of her shift loomed, she was left grasping at straws; finding nothing left with which pull a miracle out of the early morning chaos.

Leaving the student at the dying man's bedside with the admonishment that should he stop breathing to scream, Rin made a beeline for the computers she knew physicians magically sprouted from in the early morning, hoping for help – hoping for anything to help the poor man she cared about and cared for.

She saw the familiar violet-clad back hunched over a chart, and for once - in a thankfully very, very rare while - was overjoyed to see Dr. Onigumo's demonic presence in her stormy life.

"Dr. Onigumo. Please come to room five now. I have a patient in distress; cold, diaphoretic, and pale, gasping for breath. He says he's fallen three times in the last hour and his blood pressure is dropping...", Rin stated seriously over his stiff shoulder at his interruption. "He's had bloody..."

"Whose patient?" Naraku lobbed back at her without interest or even looking at her for that matter.

"Dr. Sumire's. Admitted last night with alcohol withdrawal and jaundice..."

Naraku turned to bite her head off, Rin could tell and her reflection in his dark red eyes pleaded back at her for any kind of help – even if she had to pay the price and bargin with the Devil.

But Naraku Onigumo, MD was no fool and he followed his fellow caregiver into the ever-present battleground of all too-temporary humanity after a mercifully short report.

After a very quick exam, Naraku grabbed the back of her neck and leaned into her twitching, adrenalized ear, whispering to her with his beautiful voided voice.

"There's nothing left, my girl."

Did she feel him kiss her ear at the bedside of a dying man? She _must_ have be delusional, despite the bugging eyes of her over-whelmed student who soon would become splattered in chaos when the fearsome Dr. Onigumo raised his terminal voice in a controlled roar to call the Code Blue...

Funny, it only took the man 25 minutes to go from talking to her to being cold and dead.

Rin sat at the foot of her patient's bed and while she couldn't weep now, she knew she would. The tube in his still mouth looked brand-new and out of place. She expected the self-depreciating flat voice of the self-admitted alcoholic to ask her what just happened to him... she wanted to tell him. She wanted to ask him to open his eyes, except that they were open – glassy and bulging with his death throes. Was it always this awful?

The student next to her squeaked comically when the dead man before them exhaled suddenly.

Rin put her hand on the young woman's back and rubbed it a little, out of instinct, mostly. She was too numb to really notice she was doing it.

"They do that sometimes after strong chest compressions."

The pale but solid girl nodded back with a clenched jaw. Her eyes were wet.

"Do you want to talk about this for your paperwork? Let's go over it from the time I came in to give his 6 o'clock meds and found him pale, sweating..." Rin began in a grey, practiced voice, waiting for the dead man before her to join in and fill in any gaps in her memory.

"Did you see the patient hit Dr. Onigumo?", the student asked in thin, warbling voice after their discussion had ground to a slow halt.

"He did – when?" Rin asked, alive for the first time in about 25 minutes.

"I think the Doctor had just given the first round of epinephrine and the patient came up and hit him – right in the nuts."

"Are you serious?", Rin gasped with a strangled laugh, trying not to screech banshee laughter in front of the corpse.

"Uh, yeah – I'm pretty sure Dr. Onigumo was limping when I saw him call the time of death and leave the room.", the suddenly smirking student leaned in conspiratorially.

"Oh my god, that's FUCKING HILARIOUS!", Rin spewed forth with wicked glee, forgetting herself utterly – professional behavior be damned; they'd never see a mighty ICU physician get his nuts handed to him by someone who ended up getting the ultimate laugh at his expense. And both women knew it. Life inevitably went on for someone...

After Rin's snorting giggles started to subside, they both felt better. She thought she could she now see the dead man grinning around his intubation.

"Hope this guy didn't ruin him for you, Rin.", the student smiled back at her with absolutely no guile.

"Oh MY god, even you students know?", Rin hung her head between her knees and wanted to _scream_.

_*** Second part written as catharsis for a patient I really did lose this morning, who did hit someone in the nuts during his terminal event – __requiem in terra pax__ and so forth... I'm sorry I couldn't save you.  
_

_- The Voice in the Wilderness._


	3. Chapter 3

_All copy-written characters are the sole properties of their holders and no infringement is intended; no money is being made. As if people would pay my for this... lol_

Kagome tripped on the threshold but managed to not get too wet in the unseasonable late Spring chill.

Rin let her friend and co-worker in through the dilapidated door and went back to doing her second most favorite thing in the world; hiding from her problems. This time it masqueraded as cleaning the living room furniture. Rin's new roommate was a strange sort of slob, things were clean but in casual disarray – shit piled here or flung there. Rin had decided it was dusty too; her hands reeked of furniture polish, Kagome noted with a shriveled nose. Where had she seen that grey velvet dust-rag before?

"When did you move?"

"Uh, a few weeks ago. Surprising how much shit you have when you move. I ditched most of it – the guys that got talked into moving the last couple boxes should be here already.", Rin thought out loud, trying to keep from scratching her nose with her waxy hands, waggling her face to try to assuage the annoying sensation. "Wonder if the rain's keeping them?"

"Just sneeze and cut the foreplay already!", Kagome laughed and shrugged off her damp coat, tossing it onto a soft, large case leaning against the nearest wall.

Three wet sneezes later, Rin gave up her one-woman crusade against dust and clutter. She braved the kitchen to grab her friend something cold and wet to drink. Now sitting comfortably in the middle of the bleached hardwood floor, Rin tried to remember why Kagome was here in the first place. The cell phone had rung her awake this morning and she'd agreed to whatever the voice on the other end had said to her before full consciousness had settled for the day – hence Kagome in her living room.

"You always sit on the floor in your own house?", Kagome lightly questioned the befuddled woman idly picking at her red toe-nail polish.

"Eh, it's not mine.", Rin quickly forgot herself and answered truthfully.

"Really?"

"Huh?"

"Nothing, Rin. So, about the horrific code last week; wanna go somewhere and talk about it?", Kagome shook her suspicions off like the rain in her black hair and fixed Rin with her most charge nurse-like demeanor.

"Is that what I said? I was half-awake... but – yeah. I really do. I think I need to.", Rin yawned behind her hand and realized she was still elbows-up in cleaning and worrying her latest sad attempt at a pedicure to death. Neither of which was becoming on her in the slightest, nor was it putting her mind at ease. She might as well go out.

She thought she could hear slow, even breathing through the closed bedroom door.

"Let me wash this crap off my hands and change my clothes really quick. I feel like Irish food...", Rin smiled to herself and pushed up off the ancient wood. Lifting her small foot to take a purposeful step in the right direction, the old floorboard complained with a dry snap. Even Kagome squeaked at the sheer volume inside the still house. Urban re-gentrification, her ass, Rin rued to herself, trying not to breathe.

Seconds dripped down like the slow rain outside but nothing moved – or woke up.

"Oh thank fucking god...!", Rin whispered in a rush to herself. She knew she couldn't hide it forever but she planned on trying to, as long as she could.

Kagome raised an eyebrow but said nothing – for a change.

Rin hit the bathroom by the office, threw her dust-rag over the pristine ES-175 on the stand and pawed through her stuff looking for clean clothes. Kagome could hear her friend muttering to herself and wanted to laugh. It was ridiculous; what was this – high school? The sound of running water wandered into her ears and Kagome found herself perusing her surroundings idly in wait.

The table before her had an interesting couple of books, an old copy of The Lancet journal and a low leather-covered box. The box was partially resting on the sharpest kitchen knife Kagome had ever lain her eyes upon. The dust jacket for one of the books featured a round orb of pink quartz which Kagome noted was from something called the Shikon mine. But the box was what kept drawing her eyes. It looked... lived in... something told her it's proximity to the wicked piece of butchery so out of place on a living room table bespoke of pure and concentrated malevolence to her. Being Kagome, she naturally wanted to see what was inside.

"Don't touch that!", Rin hissed in her most excellent timing; her friend's hand was resting on the lid to her junkie boyfriend's works and her knowledge would be the end of everything. It wasn't something she really wanted to be discussing over lunch – _ever._

"What? Why – what is it?", Kagome drew back her hand like the soft worn leather box had been iced in molten lead.

"It's not mine.", Rin spat. "Let's get the hell out of here before something horrible happens."

"Horrible? What is going on with you? Who else is here?", Kagome stood, meeting Rin at the thick oak front door.

"No one. Let's just go.", Rin sighed out and fished for her keys. The newest one was a deep shade of metallic violet.

"Wait -Rin. I need to make a phone call before we go out in the wet.", Kagome backed up, away from escape.

"Uh, ok – just, I'm really hungry...", Rin nervously spoke to the front door, trying to open the stubborn locks.

"No problem – it'll just take a sec.", Kagome spoke with strange finality, fished a paper out of her purse and began to dial. "Thank the gods for caller id."

"Wait... Kagome!", Rin struck a brain-wave and froze herself to the door, which happily entrapped her in place.

Kagome's normally sweet disposition turned piercing as she listened to a cellphone ringing in the room next to them. It rang four times before a large organic mass shifted enough to pick it up. Both women stared at each other; one defiant, the other defeated and annoyed.

"Onigumo.", a sleep-raspy voice growled into Kagome's ear in a weird kind of stereo, since she could also hear the same voice muffled from behind the bedroom door to her left...

"This call had better not be coming from my living room.", Naraku bitched around a yawn.

Kagome hung up the phone quickly and bugged her eyes out at her friend slumped against the recalcitrant door.

"What did you do? Rin?", Kagome squawked hoarsely at her weakly grinning friend, gesturing wildly at the bedroom door, which promptly opened to one very tall, sleep-rumpled mass of questionable humanity. Naraku's throat wore a new gorget of red and purple bruises, his whip-thin chest and hips had suspicious welts that Kagome had an ugly feeling might match Rin's fingernails perfectly. Thank god the rest of the maniac's body was covered by a pair of black pajamas.

"What _did_ you do, little Rin? Go ahead and tell her.", Naraku goaded Rin from her impromptu spotlight against his front door. He sauntered lazily between his little mistress and her shocked friend, running his long white fingers over the wood behind the furiously-thinking woman with a wicked smile. Pulling Rin off the door, Naraku turned her back against him quickly, shouldering them both up against the unforgiving slab.

"Tell her what we did against this very door and tell her how I made you scream...", he hissed down into her ear, covering them both in his wild, sleep tangled hair, facing down Kagome's shocked gaze with no little enjoyment.

"Naraku – quit it!", Rin fired back at her purring lover without looking at him.

"I remember your pleas last night being a bit different-", Naraku started, looking down at the woman before him with mock disbelief, helping himself to a fine view of her cleavage in the process. The feeling of his girl's suddenly too-strong hand gripping his cock was fantastic; it was all Naraku could do not to break her in half, right here in front of her meddlesome co-worker; Rin's anger never failed to pump fire in his veins, making him throb heavily in her warning, squeezing grasp.

"I'm going out. Aren't I, Kagome?", Rin spoke in a tightly controlled voice. She squeezed her hand behind her back just a little harder and felt Naraku take a deep, shivering breath in response.

"Yes, I suppose you are, Rin. Is he going with us?", Kagome knew better than to argue – Rin's dark eyes were fixed and dilated with all the compromise she was going to tolerate until food and drink made her human again. Irish food sounded _fucking great_.

"No, he is not. He is going back to sleep because he was on-call last night.", Rin answered quickly in her dull, angry voice before anything else could be said about it. Assent was given behind her as Naraku cupped her clutching hand tight around his captured cock and groaned heavily, which he hid nicely in a showy yawn.

Kagome's eyebrows shot up at the large man blocking their escape. He seemed to be waiting for something. Long black hair twisted in the slight draft as Naraku tested Rin's determination to do nothing to him but leave.

Rin turned around and pushed Naraku out of her way, which he allowed when she whispered a strange guttural-sounding word to him.

Kagome could have gone her whole life and most of the next one without seeing the half-naked Dr. Onigumo rubbing his crotch with a devious smile as they passed his smirking, sleep-fuddled form on the way out the door. Rin didn't bother to close it behind them. She hit the first high metal step at a dead march and didn't stop until the smell of Guinness and corned beef was assaulting her nose like a kick-boxer.

"What did you say to him?", Kagome finally let her curiosity get the best of her friendly silence in the busy cafe.

"_Verstaendlich_. It's German for 'do you understand?'", Rin pinched her brows together in the hand not cuddling a large glass of black beer. "Or so I've been recently taught."

"What – is that the safe word or what?", Kagome shot out suddenly with a stupid grin.

"He wishes.", Rin snorted back and took a huge drink of her beer, trying not to smile.

"You know you two are worst couple I've ever seen. Seriously. You're going to kill one another.", Kagome scolded around a mouth-full of her drink.

"Again – he wishes.", Rin tossed back, eating slowly. She was tempted to forgo the fork and just feed herself the pink meat with her fingers. Minutes dragged as she remembered the last time she'd been... requested... to eat in such a fashion. Wet, shivering minutes... remembering Naraku's lying tongue in her ear, whispering sin upon delicious sin to her, his fingers within her – driving them both mad.

Kagome noticed a flush begin in her friend's down-cast cheeks; she didn't really want to guess why.

It was just – wrong – somehow to picture them together.

"You know he has deep-seated emotional problems for which the man needs to seek heavy medical treatment, Rin.", Kagome tried again, none too gently.

"Kagome. You're not telling me anything I don't already know here.", Rin groused. "Stop bitching about it, already."

"Why _him_?"

"Ask _him_!"

"I will not, besides when has he ever given a straight answer to anything?"

"You'd be surprised."

"No shit I would!", Kagome swore – with gusto.

"I think the Mets are going to take it this year, don't you? They're solid – they're going to go all the way...", Rin spoke to the air before her raised glass with a tiny smile, faraway eyes smoky in their utterly false reverie.

"Fine – if you don't want to talk about it, let's just go drink then.", Rin's closest friend and biggest critic threw up her hands with a grimace.

"Now you're finally talking sense, my friend."

.USW.

"Where are you?", Naraku grated into the phone, crunching mercilessly through a piece of ice. The rain had lifted for the moment, but the cold humidity had been kind enough to stay. The forecast was calling for sleet and freezing rain tonight. Hair stuck the physician's marred and sweaty back as he stood outside. It did nothing for his mood.

"RIN! – where are we? Your _boyfriend_ wants to know!", Kagome screamed over the music.

"Who are you talking to?", Rin's intoxicated slur echoed back into Naraku's mostly amplified ear. He looked again at the phone's screen – the number said the bitch was next door...

"She says your an asshole, Onigumo and to eat shit and die!", Kagome laughed into the phone, putting her head on the bar, because it seemed like the thing to do when the going got drunk and weird.

.USW.

Rin stretched her stiff neck, these damn bar stools sucked. It was dark outside – and she was mostly drunk. She idly wondered if Juuromaru had ever brought her last few boxes of shit to her new address. She really needed to go home and check on that... eventually.

Kagome was still sipping the defrosted dregs of some frozen slushy business from her somehow endless glass and chattering away on her phone to someone, someone Rin knew...

"She says you're a – hey, hey Rin, what did you call Onigumo a few weeks back? Something old-fashioned... something farm-related..."

"Farm-related, for fuck's sake? Oh, yeah – a pig fucker.", Rin grinned stupidly, trying unsuccessfully to chase a stray hair out of her mouth.

"Yeah, you asshole, you suck and you, she says - you fuck pigs! Take that!", Kagome screeched loud enough for a guy two stools away to look embarrassed for them both.

"Wait – who are you talking to?", Rin nervously pestered, reaching for the cellphone...

"Never mind – he hung up on me, the prick.", Kagome huffed and flipped her phone closed. "Let's have another; on me. To you, Rin – may the gods have mercy on your soul!"

Rin raised her mostly dead soldier and swallowed hard.

A long moment flew by and the bar's door opened on yet another customer. The wet wind came in after him, belling out hi enormous black coat like spectral wings. Pin-pricks of icy sleet frosted the wind-blown mass of black hair that seemed to whip and twine with a mind of its own. The ice had already melted in luminous trails down the dark blue lenses. The bartender got a bad feeling that came and stayed.

The tall presence stalked slowly to where Kagome and her friend were sitting in shocked silence and once he'd come within speaking distance he merely loomed. Kagome looked askance - once at the towering yet still silent maelstrom of dark oblivion invading her personal space and then once at Rin, who appeared to be slowly counting to ten with her dark eyes closed.

Kagome thought she could hear Onigumo's boots echo like iron death when he took another step up to her. She could feel the lapel of his voided coat against her arm and breathed heavily out her nose when he continued to say nothing at all and stare her down. The cobalt glass over his mad eyes threw sick-looking circles on his raw face. But it was nothing compared to the hellish slasher smile plastered across the man's silent lips.

He stepped another heavy step towards her, this time there was nowhere left to go. Kagome didn't want to crane her neck to look the looming physician in the eye, she was afraid of what he might do if she did. Ice trembled in her glass with tiny seismic waves as Kagome felt her composure begin to slip. She'd never been afraid of a doctor in her life – but then again, they're weren't in a hospital, now were they? She had thought Onigumo a maniac physician before – now he was just a maniac.

When Naraku leaned across her back suddenly to grab Rin's nearest wrist, Kagome flinched so hard she thought she'd pissed herself.

"You can relax – I'm just here to collect my _pig_.", Naraku hissed loud enough for them all to hear and pulled Rin after him as he unfolded himself to leave.

Everyone in the bar was glad to see him go.

A/N: Some kind soul has brought it to my attention that my lovingly crafted version of Naraku here resembles_ Hellsing'_s Alucard quite a bit - which is not terribly surprising, considering I'm a large fan of that manga as well. I think it's the coat and the glasses, but rest assured those are only my own Gothic personal quirks; my own dark overcoat is not wool but hand-sewn in black leather (in an earlier incarnation I made leather garments by hand for the dark and evil crowd) and the Victorian cobalt-glazed sunglasses are my own as well. They are a nice stylish way to hide one's pin-point pupils from the disapproving world... not that I'd know anything about that, now would I? Anyone who knows me knows of my two men; one who actually looks a great deal like Naraku with his pale skin and waist-length dark hair and the other, a monster nearly seven feet tall and all Dom; I like their hybridization in my fiction a great deal. Here's to hoping you do too :) - The Voice in the Wilderness. - And USW stands for "uns so weiter" or 'Etcetera." cuz it's a pain to find a suitable page break in this format.


	4. Chapter 4

_All copy-written characters are the sole properties of their holders and no infringement is intended; no money is being made._

Naraku let them into his house with her key, which he made Rin fish for in her voluminous bag – just to enjoy the late-season sleet. Dry heat hit her face hard once through the large door and Rin found herself suddenly very dizzy. Sitting down on the floor against the couch, the small woman let her disequilibrium rage itself out before she tried to worry about anything else.

"Hung-over all ready?", Naraku asked solicitously as he stalked into the kitchen.

"I hope not. I really just didn't want to talk about you, for a change – so we had a few.", Rin scowled, letting her head swim and throwing her arms back against the couch cushion for support.

She could hear water and dishes. Then she could her Naraku's boots slowly stalking back to her. Rin noted he avoided the complaining floor board completely. She felt a cool glass against her face and opening her not-quite swollen eyes, she found her dark lover squatting before her with a glass of water and two innocuous painkillers.

"You want me to call you in the morning?", Rin smirked back. Naraku looked ridiculous, wadded into a huddled mass before her, offering first aid like somebody's concerned aunt.

"Oh I'm pretty sure that'll work, Taisho.", Naraku smiled back as Rin downed the pills and most of the proffered water. His dried blood gaze was too intense to be anything near comforting. The wicked predatory smile told her something was about to go very, very wrong.

"What... what did you just give me, Naraku?", Rin dropped the glass next to her legs, heedless of the small puddle that formed on the old bleached wood.

The man before her only chuckled darkly, and kneeling over her, started slowly pulling her out of her clothing.

"Naraku – tell me; I mean it.", Rin nervously begged, trying to fend him off as he pulled her forward into himself, unhooking her bra and palming the nervous sweat from her breasts.

"Guess, my girl, guess.", he smiled into her neck as he mouthed the soft flesh with a growl.

"Naraku... ah...", Rin protested weakly, sighing hard when he pulled her head back to kiss her throat hungrily. His own moans and growls flitted back and forth in her ears like laughter and he made no attempt to stop stripping her right there on the living room floor, despite her growing anxiety.

"Promethazine." Rin whispered between her lover's lips as he brought her against him again.

"Oh no, I want you awake for this, girl.", Naraku smiled back at her, shoving his hot tongue in her mouth and setting those nerve endings on delicious fire. "Try again."

Rin scrunched her eyes closed when she felt herself lowered back against the couch once more and buttons began opening under Naraku's spidery fingers, his lips following, teasing... making her throb...

"Rohypnol", Rin shot the first unknown thing out of her mouth when she felt Naraku draw one of her freed nipples into his fiery mouth, drawing the word out of her mouth into a low keening moan. Twining her fingers in his loose hair, she tried to force her whole body down his throat when she suddenly felt his hand cup her hungry sex through her jeans, holding her very still.

"Taisho, now where am I going to get such an arcane and highly illegal substance? You're getting colder...", Naraku growled around her nipple in his mouth, flicking at it with his wicked tongue and withdrawing completely from her wet, exposed flesh with an audible pop.

"Ah fuck! I don't know, dammit... just tell me what the fuck that was you just made me take!", Rin cried out, trying to open her fly enough to guide Naraku to where she now needed him to be.

When she got to the last button of her fly, Rin found herself being bodily flipped over onto her knees. The dark man behind her laughed wickedly, his hands everywhere upon her at once; her naked belly, her swaying loose tits, her hot tight throat. Quickly, one of Naraku's hands found its way to her neck and forced her denim-covered sex to grind hard into what she knew was the dark physician's brutal cock. She could feel him twitch heavily against her and her cunt spasmed wetly in response.

So did her stomach suddenly – and not in any kind of sexy way either.

Suddenly Rin found her head spinning and hideously vertiginous, even with both hands and knees on the solid floor.

She groaned as a wave of extreme nausea hit her like a cold shower.

"Naraku... ugh... whaat wassss that shit you gaaave meee?", Rin tried to get out without breathing or moving lest she paint the floorboards before her in once-Irish food.

She felt his hot chest envelope her back as Naraku leaned down over her, his thick waving, suffocating hair cascading like a curse around them. Running one teasing finger up her naked, quavering stomach, he whispered his thick rasping voice into her miserable ear.

"Disulfram, my little whore. Enjoy the ride."

Rin felt vomit coming like a freight train up the back of her throat. There was no stopping the spasms or the sickness and she had just enough time to make it to the toilet... she prayed...

"Fucking... asshole... I hate... medicine...", Rin gasped between the hurling, the puking and the waves of incessant dizziness. Naraku was kind enough to hold her hair – after the first 30 minutes...

"Drink some more water. Dry heaves are more fun than even you deserve."

Rin drank what was probably the fourth pint of water and immediately brought it back up in a fit of snot, slime and cramping misery.

"You may thank Nurse Higurashi for this little episode. I suggest next time she decides to prank call me you persuade her otherwise." Naraku helpfully supplied for his perch on the side of the tub.

"Give me some of the Antabuse and I'll gladly share the love. Oh fuck... not... again...", Rin left off to deftly puke some more.

"I'm so sorry – this medication can only be prescribed and monitored under the careful watch of your physician.", Naraku tsked down coyly at Rin as she lay exhausted and watery upon the porcelain god.

Rin snorted her nose clear and casting her lover a baleful eye from under her sweaty, nasty hair, calmly puked bile all over his big black boots.

"Ah Taisho – people will say we're in love.", Naraku smiled down at her with endless malice and wicked devotion.

.USW.

Rin had started this vile morning by waking up with her head leaning against the foot of someone else's toilet. Wait... now it was officially a shared toilet. Oh that made things _so_ much better...

"Somebody please kill the dog that shit in my mouth last night.", Rin swore and pushed herself shakily into the somehow-friendly shower and turned on the water. Once the steam made it impossible to see out of the glass cage she'd shut herself into, Rin took her clothes off. Thank god, she'd moved some of her essential toiletries in here before... the fun started...

The orchestrator of that highly unethical fun was nowhere to be seen. Rin couldn't believe Naraku had the nerve to slip her fucking disulfram – that shit was damn dangerous on top of a belly full of alcohol!

"Fuck-stain!", Rin swore at the soap in her grip and spat yesterday's bile out of her mouth... again. She was tempted to chew some of the white antiseptic-smelling bar in her trembling hand – anything to rinse the taste of vomit out of her mouth once and for all!

_Oh that asshole was going to get it!_ Rin scrubbed the skin off her scalp just thinking of the best possible way to get back at her malevolent lover. Deep seated emotional problems, indeed. While she planned her revenge, Rin never once thought of taking her still mostly-packed shit and getting the fuck out. The things we do for love...

He wanted to battle – fine, she'd give Naraku a war.

Wait – where the fuck was he, anyway? Padding out of the bathroom after brushing her teeth about 18 times, Rin wandered in the cavernous loft, looking for the master of its depths.

He wasn't asleep – he wasn't working in his office... he was out. She found his chronograph watch was gone from its glass slab in the master bathroom; ah, he was making rounds at the slave-pits.

Ten minutes and one large steaming mug of coffee later, Rin was sitting in front of the object of her desire. She fiddled with her terrycloth robe, covering and uncovering her feet. Was she really going to do this?

Yes – Antabuse was dangerous; it was one of the worst things anyone had ever done to her, on purpose.

But watching what was going to happen to Naraku was going to be equally terrible; she'd only seen the tip of the iceberg the last time it had happened. And she was going to put him through it – _on purpose_.

They were a sick pair, her mind flitted over and then went elsewhere.

Rin wished she'd remembered Naraku didn't possess a TV – that might have distracted her from this idea of extreme mischief. Maybe Kohaku could be convinced to give hers back...

The small black leather-covered box full of hell just sat there and goaded her.

How long before his own sickness swarmed up and how bad would it get, Rin wondered?

"Fuck it; he deserves it.", she swore finally to the empty room and picking up the well-worn box, headed for the large steel kitchen sink.

Naraku returned bearing gifts, which was never a good sign. Garbed in his malevolent violet lab coat, entwined in his professional form still, the tall physician stooped to greet his lounging mistress with a somewhat chaste kiss to the top of her dark head, dropping a slim, heavy gift bag in her lap.

Of course, right on top of the book she was reading, but Rin let that go. She smiled.

"What is this? Are you apologizing for being a colossal prick, Naraku?", she asked, digging through the tissue paper gagging the mouth of the bag.

"_Being_ and_ having_ are two different things, Rin – don't get them confused.", Naraku grabbed his crotch with a smile and went out of her sight to divest himself of his professional skin.

"Silly me...", Rin shot back and then laughed. A bottle of her favorite scotch sneered up at her from the bag – and her stomach did a warning back-flip... she'd not be able to drink a sip of the stuff for some time, dammit...!

"Very funny, Naraku.", she whispered to no one in particular, because he was out of ear shot.

Rin cut her slitted eyes to the black leather-bound box on the table next to her.

"There is no such thing as even.", she muttered to herself and settled back to her book.

Even evil monsters were creatures of routine and Naraku was no exception. Flipping through the mail, ditching the proverbial khakis, unbinding his long hair – and then strangely enough, Naraku usually played. It was an idiosyncrasy Rin never seemed to be able to get over; the bastard _practiced_ incessantly, both medically and musically. She couldn't be persuaded to mindlessly perform something over and over again unless it involved bamboo skewers under her fingernails. He just often sat there in another world entirely, letting his dark mind wander and played the guitar – sometimes for what seemed like hours. It did pass the time in a mindless sonic fog – especially now that Rin was waiting for the easy time to run out.

Rin thought it was somehow an unconscious masturbatory rite and guilt-driven, but she did not want to ever go anywhere near that one out loud, so she blew out her bangs in eye-rolling annoyance. It would have been easier to blow it off, but the fact was he was insanely good at both medicine and music and it annoyed her immensely. Talented people sucked, Rin mentally huffed for the _n_th time.

"Naraku."

"Yes?"

"Food?"

"Is that a strange new _non sequitur_, Taisho or are you asking me something?"

"Come here, jackass."

"Only if you tell me I'm a nasty slut and make me eat dirt, since you've done nothing but degrade me since I walked in the door, woman.", Naraku's deep voice echoed back into the room as he sauntered into her field of vision, his long arms over his shoulder, entwined in his waist-length hair.

Rin suddenly felt sorry for what she was about to witness. Her stomach warbled and her guilt passed like a fart in the wind. "Let me help you, nasty slut.", she smiled up at the man before her. "Sit."

His left hand grazed the box with intent but continued on its way...

The suspicions rose in Naraku's red eyes like a nasty fog but he knelt before her and did as he was told – for once.

.USW.

It took less time that she imagined – maybe because he'd been working all day, maybe because he was concentrating, Rin just couldn't tell what set it off exactly. It started with her on the couch, Rin was flipping through the ever-present, ever-shifting flotsam on the table before her... avoiding the box...

"Hey, why don't you play something I've heard?"

"Probably because you have no taste in music."

"What music have you ever heard me listening to, Naraku?", she huffed back.

He said nothing and continued to dick around on the damn instrument with his back to her, as always. Well – not always, but recently.

_Very_ recently.

Today, as a matter of fact.

"Turn around so I can see you. You know I like to watch.", Rin tossed down with a dull voice and a sick smile.

The hunched physician's back hitched for just the slightest second and his playing changed from jazz modalities to slithering blues so slow she could barely make out what he was playing. Notes slid across both wire and space and the strained, spare dissonance wavered hungrily between them, rearing up like a slow serpent too drugged to strike.

She heard his deep grating voice for just a few words... offering her an empire of dirt... and the tune changed quickly once again.

"Naraku... turn around to me.", Rin repeated, throwing her book on the table.

Her dark lover ignored her, strange muted slides descending even as tonic dominant harmonics spasmed around in her ears, four times faster than she was used to hearing it – she could see Naraku's profile for a moment and his face was tense and his lips were bone-white.

Rin smiled to herself and wished him luck. Unfolding herself casually from the couch, she grabbed the damned box and slowly made her way to the large, shivering fiend with his bent back to her.

The closer she got to the other side of the large cavernous room, the worse it appeared. Rin could see Naraku's hair at his temples was soaked, his skin was wet – the thin shirt he wore clung to his long, sparse form in wet clumps, twisted and writhing like its master.

She tossed the box over his shoulder where it hit the floor, opening and scattering nothing at Naraku's long bare feet.

His mad, sick red eyes shot up to her looming down upon him – the music changed to an obnoxiously bouncing funk with slurring slides.

"You're my own personal Jesus, Taisho. You want my confession?", Naraku grinned around his grinding teeth.

"I want you to suffer, bitch!", Rin hissed with a rancor she never even realized she was capable of.

She never saw it coming – she should have. The back of the floor hit her head with a white light full of pain when Rin found herself suddenly sprawled on her back. Naraku, suddenly snarling, had thrown his guitar across the room and pulled her down under him, holding her down hard with his clammy hands. He did nothing to her, just held her down with his weight, his thick hair smoking the blue-black evening light around her in a humid, suffocating cloud.

"Call me a bitch again, whore and I'll take my bloody pleasure from your self-righteous little ass right here, right now!", Naraku snarled with dangerous anger into Rin's twitching ear, his labored rasping breaths serving her wicked reminders of his tenuous hold on sanity.

She felt his mouth on her throat before she felt the cold sweat drip onto her neck. "Get off me, you fucking junkie!", Rin snarled and tried to roll out from under the shivering man above her, playing with her skin with sharp teeth.

Naraku threw her back hard against the floor with a tight laugh and buried his face in her throat, biting her neck hard enough to draw blood. The pain blossomed in many places at once, making Rin instinctively curl herself up against the pain, trying to knock her tormentor off of her.

Shoving his head out of her throat got Rin nothing but a growling laugh and another stinging bite.

Then Naraku wiped his sweaty face on her neck; it felt disgusting – he was slimy like some kind of cave-dwelling monster, the feeling of his putrid sweat on her spit-slick neck made her skin crawl! Rin grabbed his hair and stretched her arms back as far as she could, drawing the midnight-colored strands taunt. Needing just a tiny bit more leverage, she arched her back to give her hostage a nice ripping jolt of pain.

"Let go of my hair, little girl.", Naraku mouthed into her neck where he was now tethered due to the force of her arms. The tremors along his own arms vibrated her against the floor in sickening waves.

"This little pain is nothing compared to the need, isn't it?", Rin smiled and tried to shove her knee into his stomach. The man above her winced when she felt his hair pull tight and as he lifted off her to dodge her knee, he pushed her over with her own momentum, onto her stomach. Her hands were tangled dangerously in the long, fine black hair and they both knew it; the question was – who's position was more dangerous; his or hers?

"Oh that's right, speak some more to me about need, bitch...", Naraku purred down into her ear, his voice raw with the effort of keeping her still and keeping her from ripping the hair from his scalp.

"Speak up...", he slurred out, his voice a disgusting mix of sex and madness, when she said nothing.

Rin felt his clammy hands under her shirt, helping themselves wickedly to her body. Then she heard him gagging over her shoulder. Desperate to get out of captivity before the man above her defiled her any worse than she already was, Rin shook her hands free of the tangled skeins in her own sweaty grasp and kicking until she came in contact with something organic, Rin scrabbled herself half-way across the room before she realized she was both loose and vomit-free.

Looking back, she noticed Naraku had just laid there in a heap, flat on his face.

"Get up.", Rin spat back.

Naraku shuddered and then laughed back at her but made no attempt to move.

"You puke, you're cleaning it up – I made it to the bathroom with a stomach full of Antabuse, you can trot your happy ass there too. You're such a fucking drama-queen, Naraku.", Rin grinned as she stood and stretched. She'd give him another couple of hours of cold turkey... unless he got worse. The cramps and nausea and cold-sweats were bad, but not dangerous. It was the convulsions, vomiting and diarrhea she wasn't too keen about.

"I'm dead, I'm dead, I'm dead...", he muttered to the floor.

"It's 'undead', idiot.", Rin corrected him.

"It's on the turn-table if your feeling merciful to poor little me, baby...", Naraku gurgled out, weakly trying to find his way out of his tangled masses.

"Ugh – don't call me 'baby', you prick. It's nasty."

She was feeling just a... tiny... bit bad about Naraku's sorry state. He flipped himself on to his back with labored breath and tried to peel the wet, sweaty hair from his pallid face while she fucked with the electronic behemoth her lover called a stereo. Jostling the needle on the vinyl none to gently, Rin jammed her big toe into one of the speakers, earning a yowl of pain and some choice words.

"Son of a fucking bitch! Goddamn you, Naraku!", Rin squalled, trying to make sure the digit was still attached to her foot. Dark slurring surf-style tremolo bled slowly onto the floor around them.

"Goddamn me, yeah that sounds so fine - I'm fucking disgusting... a fucking waste of skin, baby...", Naraku moaned out, clawing at his chest in sudden desperation, his gravely voice cracking with need as he tried to keep himself together, fiending hard and fast at last...

"Don't call me-", Rin started to bitch, her voice hitching in her throat, when she saw what Naraku was really doing.

Moaning, eyes unseeing, the dark Imperator that was usually Naraku Onigumo, MD. - all nearly seven feet of him, was crawling towards her along the floor – begging her for forgiveness... he was begging, pleading...

"Rin, my girl, please give it back to me... c'mon baby, I _need_ it...", he cried out to her as another of the wailing damned rose his clarion voice and accused her of being undead, undead, undead...

Rin was so shocked at his desperation, she couldn't say a word. She forgot about her toe, which was oozing blood slowly from a small wound. She'd never seen anyone truly _writhe_ before...

… those that came close, she tied to the bed and had Onigumo tube and vent them. That approach wasn't going to work here, now was it?

He came slowly toward her, rising slowly to his shaking hands and knees, pleading in between dry heaving. She could have easily stepped around him; wasn't that what she'd had in mind when she'd started this nightmare of revenge?

No – this was disgusting to behold; this went beyond revenge. Naraku's eye rolled in his morbid face and when he finally made his way to her, he fell onto her feet, intoxicated with withdrawal delirium.

"Kill me, fuck me – anything. I'll do _fucking_... _anything_... you want. Just don't leave me with out my fucking needles, baby. My fucking beautiful girl... my girl... give them back to me...", he moaned without sense against her wounded foot, anxiously rubbing his face against her and tangling the masses of his nearly-dreaded hair around her frozen legs.

"Naraku – stop it!" Rin shouted down at him and she noticed with genuine fear that he flinched at the hysteria bubbling on the underside of her voice.

He laughed then, clearing his shaky voice, "That's what you wanted to see right?"

"I wanted you to pay.", Rin spoke without thinking, kicking his supporting arm out from under him, which splayed the large man on his mangled back with a painful keening moan.

Shit – she forgot about the hideous deforming scar on his back, that constant pain the very reason for his wicked addiction...

Naraku had his eyes closed for long moments and while he made no move to get off the floor, she could see he really did want to beg her, to do anything to make her give him what he needed so badly, physically and mentally. His jaws ground against the words she knew he'd only half-jokingly spewed for her benefit. Nostrils flaring for breath, Rin could see the convulsions starting on his belly, the muscles fluttering after a heaving contraction which he tried to hide from her with his closed eyes. He appeared to be giving birth to absolute misery.

She waited just a little while longer for the true begging to start.

It didn't take long – thank the gods, because Rin couldn't keep it up much longer. It wasn't her nature to cause true pain. This approached a limit to their fun – some things were not to be repeated between them. It was a turning point, a maturational crisis revealed...

"Taisho... please.", Naraku's hoarse whisper rose from the floor and caressed her heart.

"Open your eyes to me, my love.", Rin whispered back, kneeling down to pull a few sodden strands of hair from her gasping lover's dry mouth.

Naraku's bloody red eyes flew open and he searched her face with silent pleading.

"Never again, Naraku.", Rin spoke in a small but undeniable voice.

"Please...", he begged again, shaking against her legs in abject need.

It took everything in her power not to run to where she'd secreted her lover's stash of insanity.

She chose the first one she could find, drew a small dose up and walked slowly back with measured steps.

Naraku's eyes lit with sick pleasure when he saw the syringe in her hand.

"What is it?"

"Dilaudid."

He groaned and turned his right arm up to her quickly. Too quickly – even he looked disgusted.

"Give me the other one; you're left handed."

It wouldn't have been Naraku if he didn't roll his eyes at her and then comply.

His skin was cool and slimy; she was tempted to just pop him with the thin syringe...

"Don't give me tracks, retard. Aim for a vein like a professional.", he groused, restless and obscenely hungry.

"Say one more thing to me and you'll get it in the eyeball." Rin snarled back.

Naraku lay as still as he could, considering he was shaking and trying not to puke his guts up simultaneously. She got a good blood flash, the clear narcotic went it easily. She put her finger on the tiny wound to stop the escaping drop of blood. _Standard precautions when out the window when you were fucking the patient..._ Rin thought with a grimace; that was the least of her problems now.

It took only moments for Naraku's detox to stop.

The tiny smile on Naraku's lips dissolved slowly as he did under the drug's fog... his long body went slack upon the floor and he melted under her concerned finger, bit by bit.

Maroon eyes the color of dried blood flicked open for a drowsy second, pinning Rin above her lover's pale face. His rasping voice cracked again as he reached for her brooding face.

"I love you.", Naraku confessed with a sigh and then passed into exhaustion, his breathing regular and unlabored once more.

"Never again.", Rin whispered back immediately and shuddered.


	5. Chapter 5

"_Vorgef__ü__hl_."

"What did you just say to me?" Rin hated it when he whispered arcane things into her ear out of nowhere, dammit! The serpentine and completely foreign sounds slithered around her brain in an instant, making goose-flesh stiple her newly marked back into impacts of tiny pain.

"It means, 'the sense of something coming'. Is English and Japanese your only tongues?" Naraku pressed himself over her thin, guarded back, further annoying painful skin. Someone was going to need something out of the dirty utility room and then it was going to be pain of a whole different sort. She hated it when Dr. Onigumo sought her out at work!

"Oh good grammar, asshole. What do you want?", Rin hissed at the red bins before her

"The world on its knees before me, little nurse. You will do nicely in its stead. Tonight.", he hissed back, slipping something in her scrub pocket and without further harassment, melted back out the door into the everyday world of their co-mingled profession.

Rin's phone rang, summoning her back into the fray of illness and failing humanity – at least for another few hours until her shift ended.

Her back itched – like mad. She wanted nothing so much as to scratch. The scars had healed but the image was still fresh and her skin was not used to being marred, yet.

Naraku would have laughed at her had he seen Rin, doing her utmost to ignore the new facet of her inner life trying to make itself at home on her skin. But that would have made things that much more complex – he hadn't seen her for two weeks until he had sought her out amongst the bins of infectious wastes at work today. She looked uncomfortable in a very ill-defined way that had everything to do with why she hadn't gone home yet since getting back from the critical care nursing conference in the South. Plenty of time for the skin on her tattooed back to heal, but Rin knew the exposure this fresh mark would lead her into perdition, namely on her knees... later.

Rin wondered just how far his prescience manifested itself when it came to knowing who she was and what she'd done – the note she'd found slipped into her pocket, dressed down in Onigumo's fine sloping physician's hand-writing was a list of what she'd be wearing and where she'd be tonight... in approximately 20 minutes. She snarled around the _Coal Ila_ scotch in her glass as she caught sight of her bare shoulders, the halter top skimming her lower back, just under the etched black tribal wings newly made upon her own shoulder blades, trailing down just under her ribs – her own status as a fallen angel advertised to any who dare look upon her as a spotless, empty vessel for compassion. Two weeks immersed in a concentrated vat of her profession, lost amid the false sanctity and myriad double standards of a nurse's role left her dying to break out of the tiny life she was being pummeled into by her career and its endless impossible conditioning. The tattooist was friendly enough – and quite surprised by her ability to withstand six straight hours of pain to get her work finished in one sitting. She could have told the guy this little bit of discomfort was nothing – she had to keep nudging herself awake to keep from snoozing to the hypnotic buzz of the needle-gun in her ear.

Her skirt skimmed the tops of her leather boots – at least she was covered modestly for the most part. Except for the fine black jersey of the halter she wore, while it had a high collared neck, it left her entire back down to the bottom of her spare ribs open for display. She couldn't wear a bra without it looking ridiculous so she was faced with an uncomfortable sort of nudity; the whole of her tattooed back open for display tonight unless she wanted to endure the obnoxious itching feel of something as coarse as a jacket over her newly sensitized skin.

And there was no jacket of any kind listed on what she was requested to wear tonight, Rin mused thickly and blew her spicy breath out over her ice, sending a nice little scotch-coated fog up over the glass. Just for her.

Fifteen minutes... give or take. The bar was somehow not the same without the band or Kagome tonight. Quiet music poured listlessly from the house speakers. Rin wondered every time she heard the loud door clank open if she'd know her doom when it walked among them.

She slid off her barstool and powdered her nose. When she returned, the bartender had left her something new. Perhaps it had everything to do with the large man perched next to her now oft-filled glass. She looked for the tell-tale signs of her dark master in the huddled, closed-up form of the large man in the barstool next to hers.

Despite the imposing height and dark aura, it wasn't him. Her lover had _hair_.

"Is this mine?" Rin smiled at no one, letting her voice carry.

The bartender smiled. The man next to her cringed further into his mass of dark coats and said nothing.

Feedback and distortion rang hard out of the old house speakers and made them fuzz. Sonic harshness raked her ears for eternities until a quiet, fragile voice wormed its way into her ears. She hated that voice, so close to the truth all the time... she recognized it immediately.

The same song was on the stereo at home, it was one of his favorites...

_The sweetest price you'll have to pay_

_The day the whole world went away..._

Suddenly through the coming sonic onslaught of vicious noise, the degraded and disfigured fallacy of eternal brotherhood of man and togetherness ringing together in the malignant singing of the masses that filtered through and came to a dead and refreshing stop as the music went away... she knew he was here.

Of course he was. Rin looked around and found him, sitting behind her, worrying a glass in his long white fingers. Black overcoat thrown over the chair, Naraku held himself in check – his impossibly tall form casual to her elegance. The river of white flesh between the open buttons of his black shirt beckoned Rin's lips like her next drink. He had come out without the damned Victorian cobalt sunglasses for a change and his dried-blood colored gaze bit into her fading smile like ice in her non-existent panties. She suddenly remembered she hadn't seen her Master, her lover in two weeks. The ice moved up her marked spine in a flash.

He pantomimed her taking a drink from her glass. With a smile.

She did as she was told. Gilded grapes and fired-oak. It could only be Remy Martin cognac. She'd once told Kagome she'd done some pretty stupid, drunken sluttiness at a party once under that wicked spirit's influence. It was never a good thing for her if she drank the Archer... how Onigumo had heard about it, she didn't want to know.

Like the dread wings on her back, it didn't matter. It just was.

Her nipples were hard with the taste of pain that drink promised. She looked slowly over the rim of the glass at Naraku, where he waited in shadow, with his silent wicked smile.

He licked his lips slowly at her, promising her whatever she wanted. She swallowed hard and rubbed her ankles together in their tight leather. Then he twirled his fingers, motioning her to turn around.

She remembered suddenly, his scar. Pink twisted runnels of burned and cramped flesh in the bizarre form of a spider, his namesake. Demon-spider. _Oni-kumo_. His personal hell, his own given name. _Naraku_. How deep did the pain go? She realized then she knew nearly nothing about the man with whom she shared her heart and soul, not to mention that Rin had trusted him with her twin lives, both personal and professional.

His disfigurement lived between them, now mirrored by her own.

Now, she _had_ her own. They were more alike than she could have guessed, more than she'd ever wanted to believe him, every time he tried to tell her that and make her believe...

She could feel his eyes on her, following the twining black marks scarred onto her skin.

"Da-tenshi..." the big man next to her ground out, reading both their minds. Rin choked on her cognac and then she began to drink in earnest.

Naraku made her have another drink and then stalked over to her to lift her up and take her home. Rin could feel his eyes over her exposed wings like knives. When he put a hand against her neck and offered the other to her to take and go, Rin itched to shed herself and wear her lover like a skin. Two weeks of cold-turkey was far too long and she needed her fix...

"Try to separate the body from the mind; I can't – can you, my girl?" Naraku purred down to her cryptically as he ran his large white hand down her naked, scarred back. They walked together the short distance home, Rin climbing the high metal stairs to their shared lair like she was being hunted by something just at her back – her soul strained to flee the imaginary fangs she could feel against her open skin. Something was coming... something was coming upon her, hard and fast.

"Vorgefühl..." she whispered to herself and shivered as her Master let her into their home.

"You begin to understand. Let me show you what is coming." Naraku growled over her head and spun her hard against the heavy oak door, pinning Rin suddenly against the unforgiving slab with his large body.

Her mouth was forced open by his invading tongue, Naraku ripping her halter off in the process. Her skirt was less than the smallest obstacle to him as he lifted her up and wrapped her legs around his waist, grinding her naked sex into his caged erection – making them both gasp at the shrill sensation.

"Delicious little whore, I want inside of you – right now.", Naraku snarled into her mouth, gasping with need. He ground her harder against him again, dragging her newly-marked back across the hard door in the process.

"Ow – my back, Naraku – it hurts!", Rin forgot herself and complained with a hiss.

"Oh yes, tell me about pain, bitch!", he moaned into her ear, pushing her harder against the slab, freeing his hungry flesh from its cage of raw linen, pumping himself quickly with a lick of his fingers and then forcing her open body onto his thick, slippery cock in the process.

"It feels like you're trying to skin me alive, Naraku!", she wailed and hung onto his corded neck as she was fucked hard and fast against the front door.

He answered her with a tight moan and drove himself harder within her, hard enough to hurt her and she winced and tightened her legs, trying to drive him out of her with their pressure alone. Naraku laughed at her resistance, slipping far enough out to leave only the head of his brutal cock within her. Still – sweating, panting – but oh so still – he waited for her to relax and then pushed himself slowly back within her hot depths – only far enough to feel the grip of her body upon him and then withdrew again, teasing her mercilessly.

After long moments of this wicked provocation, Rin felt like she was going scream in frustration. Leaning forward to jam him harder, faster, deeper within earned her only less leverage as Naraku backed her off the door a little farther each time Rin tried to force him further within. His dried-blood eyes mocked her suffering with a tight smile and he continued just to tease her entrance with his throbbing cock, one soft but achingly slow stroke at a time.

"Either you fuck me or you drop me, Naraku – I'm tired of your games!", Rin wailed after she was frustrated for the last time in her attempt to fit him tightly within her and ride him to a frustratingly-far off orgasm.

"Your sharp little tongue gives me no orders, bitch! You think you're the only one in this world who knows what pain is? Is this what you had in mind?", Naraku snarled quickly back at her, throwing himself hard into her cunt and pinning her, full and squirming against him. His long arms were shivering with the effort of holding them at such a stand-off for so long; she had to be getting heavy and he had to want to come as much as she did. Suddenly, Rin felt so much power over him in their most excellent moment together – Naraku was trapped within her just as much as she was by him; disfigured and scarred alike. Alike as above and below and beyond she imagined... Rin pushed her line of reasoning, clenched her body around the man trapped within her and smiled wickedly back at him, all on her own.

Naraku's mad red eyes drank in her understanding and he answered her with a rhythm of long hard strokes, trying to break her before he in turn was broken. When he felt the spasms of release twist like fire up his spine, Naraku's open-mouthed moans for completion were answered by Rin's shrill calls; spiraling them out into white fire where they exploded together like a binary star in the death throes of supernovae, screaming both death and creation.

She felt his strength give out a moment after the last spasm faded, and slipping unceremoniously onto her numb feet, another shrill sensation twisted out of them both – Naraku was panting and nearly fell on top of her, his softening member slipping out. Her legs gave out first, and clinging to him, Rin found them both on their knees in a weird tableaux of supplication and release.

"I missed you.", Naraku ground out in a raw voice, holding his large mass off of Rin with his arms against the well-used door.

"Aw, Onigumo – people will say we're in love.", she snarked out his oft-used sarcasm.

His sudden guttural laugh was her only answer before she started screaming his name again.

_All copywritten characters and themes, musical or otherwise are the sole properties of their respective owners; no infringement is intended and no money is being made. The lyrics to "The Day the World Went Away" belong to Trent Reznor and I am not trying to take it away from him in any way because he'll beat me up._


End file.
